Last May the Fairfax County School Board — at the behest of the Obama Administration — forced a policy promoting transgenderism on parents and citizens who showed up in droves at the meeting to protest it. This is the theme of my Federalist article today: “Ask Not Who’s Running for President, Ask Who’s Running for School Board.” Since school boards are local and nonpartisan elections, they tend to have very low level interest and can therefore end up in the hands of organized insiders with their own agendas. In the video below, you can watch at the 1:13:50 mark as one true representative of the people, Fairfax County School Board member Elizabeth Schultz speaks before the vote. (She’s not the one pictured in the frame. She was the sole vote against in the 10-1 “ruling” with one abstention.)

This school board meeting illustrates just how enormous the impact of local elections is on our lives. It’s beyond belief how little consideration people give them. So few of us know who our local representatives are. And yet it’s so easy to find them because they’re our neighbors! This feeds right into my blog’s theme about the power of personal relationships. And if we don’t watch out, local officials easily become cronies of the federal government, instead of tending to the best interests of the citizens.

Your child’s school curricula, public transportation, zoning, and “gun free zones” are just a few of the areas of local impact. So when citizens don’t engage — or if they’re totally preoccupied with the glitz of the national stage of the presidential elections — they end up allowing less responsive officials to take over locally. And in a one-party system, corruption finds its way in very easily.

Next week, on November 3 there will be local elections held throughout the nation. Will any take place in your community? If you don’t know, please find out! Learn about your candidates and get out to the polls and vote. And spread the word so that neighbors also go out and vote for good candidates. If you need to gather information, you can start with ballotpedia. Here’s a link for municipal elections: http://ballotpedia.org/United_States_municipal_elections,_2015 To get you started on finding information for school boards, here’s their page for the school board election in Fairfax County, Virginia: http://ballotpedia.org/Fairfax_County_Public_Schools,_Virginia One of the first things it notes is that there is currently a Democrat majority of 10-2 on that Board, based on endorsements. It doesn’t have to be that way. Though Fairfax County has been trending leftward for the past few years, it is nowhere near that lopsided in reality.

For County information you may have to dig a big deeper – into the website for your local paper or local “Patch” at patch.com perhaps. You can also learn more about your county leadership by going to the website for the National Association of Counties.

Here’s an excerpt from my article today:

All too often our local officials are elected by default. There is high turnout by insiders, and particularly organized get-out-the-vote efforts by teachers’ unions and others with power stakes in the local machines.

Conversely—and ironically—there is much lower turnout by ordinary citizens whose lives the elections most affect. And turnout in local elections has actually been plummeting, according to some recent research. . .

We tend not to pay attention even though many of us may intuitively understand that the decisions of our local officials have a far more direct impact on our lives than those of a federal government that can keep its distance. The trick is to keep local power local, and that means paying attention to who’s minding the store locally.

If I had one key theme I hope listeners will come away with, it is this: Our personal relationships are the prime target of political correctness. Full control of one-on-one relationships has always been the aim of tyrants, throughout history. The outlets — media,academia and Hollywood — are basically just means for capturing the big prize of controlling personal relationships. That is why we must not allow PC to silence us.

Here’s an excerpt of the text:

“If you push an agenda to centralize power, you need mass ignorance and effective propaganda.”

Morabito says political correctness provides “a semantic fog where manipulation can occur under the guise of being fair or non-discriminatory.”

She details three tactics of the manipulation she observes. These include being subtle enough that people are not aware of the manipulation, changing our language to achieve thought control and the leverage of social isolation being used to force conformity to the elite’s narratives.

As for those who dissent from the elite’s orthodoxy or narratives, Morabito praises their courage. She mentions three positive possibilities of people who have the courage to be politically incorrect against the dominant narratives in this culture. First, such a neighbor or friend could embolden a like-minded person who is fearful, causing a positive “ripple effect.” Second, they could influence a “fence-sitter” by nudging deeper thinking, she says. And lastly, even if the listener disagrees and rejects your point of view, you may water down the stereotype or caricature made of those who hold core American principles.

I’ve added another mother-child painting by Mary Cassatt to accompany my post today because I find her work so beautiful and inspirational. It also serve to remind us that this is the most basic of all human relationships. Without healthy family bonds — cultivated through the mother-child bond — a lot goes haywire in the world around us. With family breakdown we get community breakdown. And now we’re dealing with whole scale communication breakdown.

This post is a re-cap of several pieces I wrote this week on how to break the PC-cultivated spiral of silence. Isn’t it crazy how much we are expected to police our speech — and therefore our thoughts — in everyday life? One example is how the media schools us in how to use pronouns, assuming we are all draftees into its scam of transgenderism. We also read about how millennials on college campuses have developed such delicate sensitivities to any non-PC expression that they get “triggered” into emotional meltdowns. As we walk among the eggshells, we can all use a few pointers in navigation.

I’ve been trying to provide a little bit of a primer this week in my five-part series at the British web magazine The Conservative Woman. We can not address the breakdown in communication until we understand the root causes of it.

Tuesday’s headline was: “PC Propaganda is intended to Divide and Rule.” The one critical fact to remember about political correctness is that separates people. The intended effect is to prevent you from having personal relationships and personal conversations that could get in the way of a PC agenda. In fact people are excessively policing their own speech when talking to folks who could be their friends: neighbors, co-workers, classmates. We need to push back hard against this sort of meddling.

On Wednesday I wrote “Fear Powers the PC Machine.” Hollywood, Academia and the Media fuel it. It’s so important to become self-aware, and recognize our weaknesses as human beings. Our fear is ultimately about being separated from others if we step out of line. How ironic then, that we actually perpetuate this cycle by feeding the PC Machine with our fear — separating ourselves even more from others.

Today’s headline is: “Only Connect to Fight Back Against the PC Tyranny.” This means, basically, what we must do in order to help unravel the tyranny is create the ripple effects of trust and openness in your daily life by connecting one on one with others. Trust and friendship have a powerful effect in a age that’s becoming increasingly devoid of those things. Friendship, in fact, is inextricably linked with freedom.

Tomorrow’s post will include a few rules of engagement as we go about breaking the ice with our neighbors, co-workers, and others we meet in daily life. I hope you’ll check www.conservativewoman.co.uk to read up. It’s critical that we engage.

What is it about traditional mothers that moderns find so offensive? Is it really all about “submissiveness” to something they call “the Patriarchy?” Do they really believe traditional mothers reinforce something so-called feminists call “gender roles?” On the surface it may seem this way. But I’ve been digging a little deeper and I think there’s something else at play here. Because the elites who keep feeding us that hype are usually big promoters of political correctness. And political correctness is nothing more than a silencing tool. It’s used to prop up the power of elites who push self-serving agendas that would never withstand real scrutiny.

In a very real sense, traditional mothers are probably the ultimate barrier to the consolidation and centralization of power of the Mass State. Think about it. Mothers who cultivate virtue and a sense of uniqueness in their children are the ultimate de-centralizers and distributors of power in a society. They set virtuous communities in motion. Behind the scenes.

In this first part I’d like to give you the lay of the land as I see it: How and why the agents of political correctness target any independent thinker, but particularly conservative women. And what happens when we give in to self-censorship. In the second part, I’ll talk about something called “the spiral of silence.” In Part three, I’ll dig a bit more into the mechanics of political correctness and how it works and why I believe the only way out is through the “Hidden Sphere.” In Part Four, I explore a bit about the inextricable link between freedom and friendship. Finally, in the final installment, I offer a few prescriptions on how conservative women can resist getting sucked into the PC machine – and make friends (and, sure, some frenemies) along the way.

Here’s another excerpt:

Statists are forever trying to coax us into giving up being the hand that rocks the cradle so that they can take control of the cradle for themselves. If there was so little power in what we do and what we believe, why ever would they seek to do such a thing? Why would they even care?

They care not only because we have the power to express our views and values to the next generation, but that we are actually inclined do so. Not only that, but if we are stay at home mothers with a steady source of income independent of the State, they see us as dangerously free agents in our private lives.”

The modus operandi of the LGBT lobby and the Bolsheviks are strikingly similar. But that’s the case with every power-grabbing scheme. A hundred years ago the Bolsheviks pretended to be the champion of the “workers.” Likewise, today statists call themselves the champions of gays and transgenders. It’s basically the same dynamic. The LGBT Lobby serves ultimately to consolidate power in the hands of the elite few. So what else do these movements have in common?

The abolition of the autonomous family as the ultimate goal.

Propaganda tactics that rely heavily on smear campaigns and cultivate the fear of becoming a non-person.

Conformity of expression through obedience to political correctness.

Replacement of free exchange of commerce and ideas with ironclad regulations and censorship

Nomenklatura — an elite clique in power — rules over all and directs a mammoth bureaucracy

The takeover of the media at the outset in order to control the narrative and silent dissenters

That’s just for starters. And if the “Equality Act” is passed by Congress, you can bet that compliance will be enforced and dissent will be punished. That’s a censorship act window-dressed as non-discrimination. It has nothing to do with protecting any minority demographic. The minority demographic — in this case gays, lesbians, transgenders — are simply being used as pawns. Their grievances are being used as a pretext to consolidate all power into the hands of an elite mob. This is very much in keeping with the pattern of the Bolsheviks who cherry-picked winners and losers once they took on the mantle of “vanguard” — or protector — of the workers. The Bolshevik mob never cared about the working class, except as a useful propaganda tool in their bid to grab power. In the Soviet Union, those deemed “counter-revolutionary” would be labelled as “enemies of the people.” We see the same pattern today with the LGBT lobby. And it will get much worse if the “Equality Act” goes into effect, giving the government the power to punish those it deems “anti-gay.”

So, at the end of the day, what have you got? Answer: a society ruled by elites, or a “nomenklatura.” Your currency is political connections that you “earn” through compliance with the mob. That’s how mammoth bureaucracies lock in power for their rulers. Instead of a society based upon the free exchange of goods, services, and ideas, you end up with gatekeepers — all up and down the bureaucratic ladder — who make sure the only kind of currency in use is political compliance and connections. In this sort of power structure all totalitarian societies poison personal relationships. They cultivate scarcity, which creates a nasty dog-eat-dog mentality. They cultivate ignorance so that free thought is dimmed. It’s a divide-and-conquer scheme in which people become separated as never before. As history has proven time and again in such cases, it is submission — and not resistance — that is truly futile.

Anyone who can see the reality of sex distinctions understands that women are more emotionally invested in pregnancy than men. So it is undeniable that women are the biggest losers in a society that promotes casual sex. So who are the prime “beneficiaries” of abortion on demand? Women? Or the men who wish to use and then discard women?

Clearly, it’s the latter. The dirty little secret is that it wasn’t really grassroots women activists who got abortion legalized, though they carried the sound bites. A little history shows us that abortion on demand was really an operation from the top down. Establishment men were the ones who pushed hardest for it and made it happen. Elitist men in the courts and legislatures made it happen. Feminists? They basically ran cover for them right through the Roe v. Wade decision handed down by seven male Supreme Court justices in 1973. Oh, sure, these men would couch it all in terms of “women’s rights” and hold themselves up as champions of women. Very convenient. Big of them. Easy too, because their feminist allies were their subservient enablers.

Another point is that women have always polled consistently more pro-life than men. The margin may not be huge, but it’s a persistent gap.

In my article, I discuss a recent Vanity Fair piece that’s laid bare the wasteland of the hook-up culture spawned by our abortion culture. Many defend hooking up by claiming: “This is 2015 and things have changed.” I can only respond: “This is a total throwback to ancient times. And nothing has changed.” The Vanity Fair essay is hard to read with its descriptions of men and women using the Tinder app — which you can see in the ad above — obsessively looking for sex partners in the near vicinity.

But it was all so predictable: jerk men taking advantage of women who are clearly looking for intimacy but pretend they are not. The irony revealed by the Vanity Fair article is that the women hooking up don’t even enjoy the sex. And the men are so steeped in competing with other men for conquests — through the “wonders” of phone app technology — that in their 20’s and 30’s they have an epidemic of erectile dysfunction. It’s all so pointless and stupid, aside from being cruel and destructive.

“Abortion really makes you hate men,” is an apt quote from a college classmate after she told me about her abortion. This clarified for me that abortion is like Total Warfare on personal relationships. It’s all about separating us from one another. It severs the mother-child bond as well as the man woman bond. (The father-child bond was the first casualty.) The abortion mentality requires destructive coping mechanisms in which the women must emotionally separate themselves from the person of the child as well as from the father.

So much love has gone missing through the descent into our culture’s abortion mindset. People have lost so much respect for life, for others, and for themselves. Intimacy has become elusive for so many. And happiness? So much of it gone, in the name of “choice.”

Wanton cruelty to animals is well known to be a precursor to cruelty to humans. So humaneness to animals is a quality that any civilized society should insist upon. I touch on this in my recent Federalist essay: “Iran’s War Against Dogs.”

Dogs are amazing creatures, and it’s no wonder that there is a strong bond between them and human beings. As companion animals they have a childlike innocence, a trust and loyalty that tends to melt our hearts. If we are in pain, they often sense that and will stay by our side to lend comfort. They are balm to loneliness.

The empathy and loyalty of dogs to their human companions runs deep. They are great protectors and morale boosters who bring us joy and laughter. Everybody benefits — including those who don’t particularly care for dogs — in a society that recognizes and cherishes the canine brand of companionship and unconditional love.

So what are we to think of people who have no qualms about the wanton killing and torture of dogs? (My essay includes a video of the killing of dogs by acid injection, something I did not post here.) Obviously, there is something sociopathic going on with them.

We ought to understand that that’s the type of mentality the Obama Administration is propping up as it lends hefty support to the authoritarian dictators of Iran. We all know that the mullahs there not only preach death constantly – to America, to Israel, to Jews, to Christians, to Muslims they deem apostate – but they are also in the process of building a nuclear weapons program.

Americans seem to have become desensitized to the gravity of that threat, and even to the beheadings in the Middle East. But the sanctioned barbarity visited upon helpless dogs in Iran is something that can at least direct attention to the nature of that regime.

This is not just a war on dogs, but a war on all personal relationships. The Iranian government would like all dogs completely banned as companion animals, especially now that more citizens there have dogs and the bond of love is growing. This is in keeping with any tyrant’s pattern of separating people from one another in order to control them. This pattern of isolating the controlled is a specialty of sociopaths like cult leaders and wife beaters too. The idea is to separate their victims from any source of happiness independent of the tyrant’s control.

Let’s just remember that all dictators have on their agenda the intent to control every aspect of every person’s life. In Iran this extends right down to the intent to forbid citizens to enjoy the companionship of dogs.

I often write and talk about how power elites have pretty much taken over all of the outlets of communication. I’ve assigned an acronym to the main three outlets: “HAM”– for Hollywood, Academia, and the Media. Today I want to recommend to you a major essay that focuses on a vastlly more powerful outlet of communication: the “hidden sphere.” The hidden sphere is basically private life, which is outside the realm of HAM. This means the activities and exchanges that happen in your personal relationships and your private conversations. And it is these interactions which are actually considered the biggest prize of power elites. If you think what you say as “just one person” is not important, think again. The entire point of political correctness is to shut you up as “just one person.” Being “just one person” makes you extremely powerful because what you freely say to others who like you and trust you — whether a neighbor, classmate, co-worker — has the power to shatter the fragile narratives of PC elites.

In the upper right hand corner of this blog, you can see a quote that’s been there from the beginning:

” . . . his action went beyond itself, because it illuminated its surroundings, and because of the incalculable consequences of that illumination.”

That’s from Vaclav Havel’s extraordinary essay “The Power of the Powerless.” In it he speaks of the hidden sphere as the nucleus of freedom because it is that place in which people have one-on-one interactions that allow for the cultivation of trust and the cross pollination of ideas. It might start very small, but as the ideas are pollinated by those who are influenced, there is a ripple effect of truth that becomes irresistible. Here’s another excerpt:

The singular, explosive, incalculable political power of living within the truth resides in the fact that living openly within the truth has an ally, invisible to be sure, but omnipresent: this hidden sphere. It is from this sphere that life lived openly in the truth grows; it is to this sphere that it speaks, and in it that it finds understanding. This is where the potential for communication exists. But this place is hidden and therefore, from the perspective of power, very dangerous.”

Havel was an independent thinker and a lover of truth and freedom in communist Czechoslovakia. This made him dangerous to the totalitarian regime. Indeed, one could say he spearheaded the “Velvet Revolution” that ended communism in Czechoslovakia after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Havel then served as president of the Czech Republic. His essay can be a bit difficult to plow through – and it’s very long — but it’s fascinating because it reveals to each of us our immense power as individuals. Please get familiar with it, at least its basic premises. From it we can learn how our decision to speak truth in love is an action that goes beyond itself. It illuminates its surroundings and the consequences of that illumination are incalculable. The Hidden Sphere is the sword that can slice through the Gordian Knot of totalitarianism.

We talked about how political correctness creates a spiral of silence that ends up separating people as never before. PC not only squashes civil discourse, but creates a strange and rigid polarization in society that spawns destructive caricatures of others. As someone who used to identify on the Left, I understand well what a mindset that stereotypes others can do to people’s ability to connect. The point of this kind of propaganda is to centralize power by first dividing people, quite often by demonizing those who don’t subscribe to the narrative. It breaks up personal relationships. And this allows those wielding power to control who says what to whom, and to dictate who relates to whom. People who obey the narrative are allowed to partake of society, while those who don’t subscribe to the narrative end up as “nonpersons.” This taps into my theme that personal relationships are the ultimate source of human power. Ground zero for functioning relationships is the family unit. That’s exactly why the family is the prime target for destruction by today’s forces of political correctness.

PC corrupts the language, and when the language is corrupted, thought processes become corrupted as well, and people are more easily manipulated into mindless conformity. And when the masses can be mobilized to support the agendas of power elites, things never end well for human dignity. History has taught us this lesson time and again.

We have no choice but to resist. Ultimately, this is an asymmetric war that has to be fought persistently, one-on-one, and face-to-face by putting a human face on what we believe. By engaging with those we know in daily life, we can re-create the ripple effect of true community that political correctness is designed to destroy.

In summary, the Gordian Knot of totalitarianism contains at least three essential ingredients: family breakdown, censorship, and ignorance.

Family breakdown leads to community breakdown, and that leads to a sense of alienation and dependency. That, in turn, results in the sort of unrest we’ve recently seen in places like Ferguson and Baltimore.

Censorship is inherent in political correctness, but it’s coming down the pike full force if Congress enacts the Orwellian-named “Equality Act.” The purpose of censorship of that sort is to inhibit communication among individuals and therefore obstruct autonomous personal relationships. It sows distrust and fear and helps build a surveillance state.

Ignorance is cultivated first through the erosion of family bonds and community bonds because this separation destabilizes a person’s sense of self and makes it difficult to connect the dots about reality in the world around us. It gets worse as the forces of this destabilization promote more ignorance by throwing knowledge of the historical record down the memory hole. At that stage of ignorance, fewer and fewer have a clue as to how propaganda works or how we are being manipulated.

At the end of the day, in such a regime only a small clique of rulers dictate who may say what to whom and who may relate to whom. As described in the panel illustrated at the FDR Memorial pictured here, these are folks who “seek to establish a system of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers.”

Unfortunately, that’s the goal of the agendas that are built into this Gordian Knot: control of all personal relationships. Those who are working to build this dystopia might call it a “new order.” They might call it a “transformation.” They can call it whatever they like. But it is definitely not new and definitely not an order. It’s just an ancient divide-and-conquer scheme based on the sin of human pride and power mongering. “Order” turns out to be something like the inner workings of a clock in which people are simply cogs in a machine and there is no way out.

It’s same old, same old. And history has shown that it never ends well. We can only slice through it from the bottom up. Through individuals who share their knowledge of the truth, speaking in trust and developing real friendship with others. This creates just the sort of ripple effect that family breakdown and censorship and ignorance are meant to prevent. It creates the ripple effect that can free us. Self-cocooning with like-minded folks is a trap. There is no media or pop culture or academia to help out with this. Those forces are currently all tied up in the Gordian Knot. It’s now an asymmetric war in which we must all invest in the ripple effect of one-on-one communication.